Charles Spencer's Boarding School Nightmare

IN A HEARTBREAKING NEW MEMOIR, THE HISTORIAN AND BROTHER OF PRINCESS DIANA REVEALS THE SECRET ABUSE HE SUFFERED BEGINNING AT AGE 8

- MICHELLE TAUBER

Charles Spencer was a round-cheeked, redheaded, curious child brimming with so much energy that his mother, Frances Shand Kydd, gave him a distinctive nickname. “I was such a happy little effervescent guy,” says Spencer, 59. “My mother would call me Buzz, like a little bee buzzing around.”

But everything would change for young Buzz at age 8, when he was sent to live at an elite English boarding school, Maidwell Hall. The heir to the aristocratic Spencer family estate—his father was John, 8th Earl Spencer—he enjoyed a privileged childhood alongside his older sisters Sarah, Jane and, of course, Diana, who would go on to marry Prince Charles in 1981. But nearly a decade before that historic day, Spencer’s world was turned upside down with his entry into the cold, cruel halls of Maidwell. In his candid new memoir A Very Private School, Spencer confronts the childhood trauma of his harrowing five years at an institution that left its young students vulnerable to predatory adults. It was a difficult book to write, plunging Spencer—who reveals for the first time that he was the victim of physical, verbal and sexual abuse at the school—into a painful past. “I had always felt that I had dealt with this chapter of my life and had put it to bed,” he says. “But talking to classmates and hearing their experiences was very triggering for me. I’d be very struck by the horror of what they had shared. And that was the hardest bit.”